It only took one trailer to hook me. A female protagonist in a fantasy setting with giant robot dinosaurs? I just had to know what all that was about.
Horizon Zero Dawn takes place on Earth in the far future. Exactly when or where, we don’t know, but humankind has devolved into a tribal society. Oh, and there are robots everywhere. Some are uncannily similar to regular old animals and are hunted as such. Others are larger and battle-ready, armed with drill-horns and cannons.
Our heroine, Aloy, is an outcast of the Nora tribe. She doesn’t know who her real family are, or why she was outcast at birth. After being raised in the wilderness by her guardian, she sets her sights on the Proving, a tradition of the Nora where entrants – outcast or not – can compete to become warriors of the tribe. She’s determined to win to earn the acceptance and answers she longs for.
And so begins one of the most incredible open-world adventures I’ve ever experienced. Horizon is a triumph, containing a vividly imagined and gorgeously realised world, a compelling lead character, and a thought-provoking story that kept me guessing right the way through.
Let’s start with the world. A quick run-around during the opening few hours showed me thick forests and snowy mountains, but when the game opened up it took my breath away. Across arid deserts, beneath and canopies of dense jungles, and over grassy, blossoming planes, I ran, climbed, and parkoured my way through what is likely the most visually impressive open world I’ve yet seen.
I’m not just saying the graphics are good. Obviously they are. But the wonder is in how the place feels. Everywhere has an atmosphere. The desert sand feels hot, dead, and dry like it’ll crack under your feet, while the jungles are abuzz with life. This detail and diversity is why it drops a robotic dung on the likes of the worlds in snow-and-rocks Skyrim and plains-and-farmland Witcher 3. Also unlike a Bethesda game is how I didn’t encounter a single bug or glitch in the 60+ hours it took to finish the story. It’s seamless. No loading screens, either, except on fast travel or death.
And this is without even mentioning the game’s dungeons. Lurking beneath this natural sprawl are awe-inspiring ancient ruins. Ancient here meaning, to us, futuristic, so these ruins are actually a sci-fi tangle of wires and machines containing relics ranging from coffee cups to audio diaries.
The gameplay of Horizon is where it shines. There’s a great variety of robots to hunt and fight. Many are animal analogues; Grazers and Striders mimic deer and horses. Others are bigger and deadlier like the Sawtooth and feline-inspired Stalker. They all have weak-spots, a laughably old video game trope but, like the world of Horizon, it’s the variety and diversity that make it work.
All machines are coated in armour which can be chipped away, allowing you to shoot their vulnerable innards, but it goes deeper than that. Striders have an explosive canister on their backs, for example. Shooting it hurts them more, detaching the component and allowing you to harness it for resources. But shoot it with a fire arrow and it’ll explode, severely harming the beast. Shooting a Ravager’s gun will detach it – you can then pick it up and use it yourself, if the Ravager stops clawing you long enough for you to get at it.
What makes this so engaging is that, while machines can be scanned for weaknesses, the game offers no tutorials on how best to take them down. Shooting a Trampler’s udder-like undercarriage causes an explosion. That seems a sound strategy, but wait till their herd-mentality kicks in and there are a few stampeding towards you. Planning, trial and error, and resourcefulness all amount to some thrilling and satisfying combat experiences. Spamming arrows doesn’t work, you’ve got to think.
I glossed over herd-mentality there, but it’s worth talking about the AI – and not just the fact that they are robots. Weaken one Trampler and it’ll flee to the back of the herd while the others charge forward. Longleg’s will use their antennae to signal for reinforcements if you give them a minute to think. This kind of challenge is brilliant and often not seen. In Fallout, you can shoot anything long enough and it’ll go down. In Horizon, your enemies use their own resources while you try to outwit them.
There’s also a rich variety of weapons at your disposal. Backing up your spear and bow is a crossbow that lays booby traps, a harpoon gun that pins enemies to the ground with ropes, and an explosive-launching slingshot. They all have their functions, and what’s more is that none of them are that powerful. There’s no one amazing bow. It’s all about your skill.
There’s nothing like the feeling of developing your own technique for taking down each machine. The stealth mechanic is also simple but fully-functioning and often encouraged. Tracking your foes while you lurk in tall grass, knowing that blowing your cover could mean a horde of metal monsters going berserk at you, is joyously intense. It’s an intensity only matched by the first time the game pits you against one of the bigger machines. And I mean big.
Before I talk about my favourite aspects of Horizon, let me mention a brief criticism. I’ve seen many reviews complaining that Horizon is derivative of many other open world RPGs. You know what? They’re right. I see many mechanics in Horizon that are either inspired by or almost directly taken from other games. But what I will say is that Horizon does them better, and combines them to make a more fluid action-RPG experience.
Take its skill tree. Nearly every new skill slot grants a new ability, unlike Witcher 3 where you have to fanny around with +2% melee bonuses. Similarly, instead of messing you around with dozens of menus and inventory slots, Horizon streamlines the whole process. The fire plant is used to brew the resist fire potion. Done. That potion near-nullifies fire damage, too, making them more worthwhile than some +10% resist fire bullshit destined to clog up your carry capacity.
It has a loot system like Borderlands, but that only encourages you to go out and hunt. A lot of side missions are just fetch-quests – legitimate criticism, I agree, but I’ve never played an open world game that isn’t full of fetch-quests. And when the combat is as good as it is in Horizon, I don’t groan when I find out I have to go out and kill a Snapmaw. I get excited. And a bit scared.
One thing which is probably derivative that I’d never seen before is that the better items require you to spend not just money but other rare items, too. In Skyrim, you’ve got enough money after the first few quests that you never have to think about anything again. In Horizon, if you want that improved armour you’re going to have to work for it. (I feel like I should note that I actually really like Skyrim, it’s just the most accessible point for comparison!)
So onto my favourite parts: the story and the protagonist. It’s got such a powerful hook that I just couldn’t ignore it when I first saw it. Just why are all these machines everywhere? I couldn’t put it down until I found out. So many mysteries, and the revelations are wonderfully paced with a lot of thematic depth.
But before we even uncover those secrets we have some fascinating ideas on the surface. We see explorations of religion and culture – its birth and effects. The Carja tribe lives in the desert, so they came to worship the sun. The Nora tribe lives by a big mountain, so they came to worship a personification of the mountain. Not only that, but the Carja are more “advanced” and “civilised” than the other tribes, able to build huge cities and monuments. And they just happen to be the ones that antagonised the other tribes in the name of religious righteousness in the events leading up to the game.
We take this journey through the eyes of Aloy, one of the best protagonists of recent years. Even though the Nora are a matriarchal tribe, she has to battle against adversity just to be a part of it. And when she ventures out into the rest of the world, there’s more she must contend with because of her tribe and her gender. After everything she’s been through, she’s defensively sarcastic, vulnerable, but above all, fiercely independent.
What’s more is that she is in no way sexualised. Many appeal to Lara Croft when talking female protagonists but her appearance is made for men, let’s admit it. Better yet, the writers of Horizon didn’t make the mistake of making Aloy a tomboy. She’s three dimensional and endures an emotional arc throughout the game. I love Aloy, and I love playing as her.
It’s relevant to even the smaller side quests like getting to be a member of the hunter’s lodge. It’s a prestigious organisation run by an arsehole who doesn’t want a savage Nora to be any part of it, least of all a woman. It’s just another obstacle for Aloy to overcome, but it all ties together with the game’s larger scope of equality and inclusion. It’s awesome. And yes, many are already criticising the game’s “feminist agenda” but I guess I’m one of those SJW liberal snowflakes who laps this shit up.
My only criticism of Aloy (though I’m a bit torn on this issue) is that the moral decisions we’re allowed to make seem to carry very little weight. On one hand, I wanted more freedom with Aloy to see the impact of my choices, but on the other hand, restricting what we did with her allowed for much stronger storytelling. For example, you can be “whoever you want” in Fallout 4 but it doesn’t work when everything you say is said by the most boring voice actor ever to walk into a recording booth. There’s no real depth of character there.
What’s my biggest criticism with Horizon Zero Dawn? Sure, I’ve got my niggles, like how I literally didn’t get one opportunity to use the death from below skill, the character face animations are sometimes all over the place, the rewards for collecting secret items are lacklustre, and the dialogue is sometimes a bit cheesy. But really, my biggest bugbear is that it’s too short.
The main quest is perfectly paced with all its secrets and revelations, and I had a great time with it. But Horizon needed just a few more sets of side missions. A guild or two wouldn’t have gone amiss, just with a few quests each. The hunter’s lodge quests didn’t last long but they had real consequences and thematic relevance. A few more of these would have been great. The other day I finished the game and I felt a bit hollow. What do I do now?
Seriously, I feel at a loss. Horizon gave me a finely crafted open world that I absolutely loved being in, with a protagonist who I absolutely loved being. What now, the real world? No – Horizon is that good that I might just do it all again.
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